Highlights from Level Up with Crossplane, Presented by Upbound

On May 7, 2024, DevOps, SREs, and open-source enthusiasts and professionals from the Crossplane community gathered online for, "Level Up with Crossplane, Presented by Upbound.”

For both beginners and intermediate practitioners, the event was a great way to build expertise, engage directly with key people in the Crossplane community, and walk away with actionable advice on refining their platform-building strategies. Hosted by Viktor Farcic, the event offered a comprehensive agenda, ranging from introductory overviews to deep dives into complex topics like CRD versioning and testing patterns.

Whether you missed the event or are looking to revisit the highlights, this blog aims to encapsulate the key learnings and moments from "Level Up with Crossplane, Presented by Upbound." Join us as we dive into the details of the sessions and more.

What’s New with Crossplane v1.15

Philippe Scorsolini, Senior Software Engineer and Crossplane Maintainer, covered the latest release of Crossplane. Released in February, it refined the command line interface (CLI) and introduced functionality that streamlines the development of cloud infrastructure within the control plane paradigm. He also reviewed updates to composition functions, a new Python SDK, and other improvements in the session.

Take your Crossplane skills to the next level: A hands-on tutorial implementing a composition with functions

Philippe guided participants through how to develop a Crossplane composition using new features in the Crossplane CLI and building a Composition Functions pipeline. See the dedicated repository.

Crossplane Testing Patterns

Steven Borrelli, Principal Solutions Architect, and Yury Tsarev, Principal Solutions Architect, walked through various Crossplane testing scenarios. Steven demonstrated how to accelerate Composition development using Crossplane’s render and validate CLI subcommands. Yury demonstrated uptest, an end-to-end testing framework, and discussed the road to uptest 1.0. Tools for testing Crossplane Compositions from developer desktop to CI integration were introduced during the session.

How to break your APIs without breaking your users and how CRD versioning

Crossplane enables organizations to create a cloud native platform using Composite Resource Definitions and Compositions. David Murphy, Principal Solutions Engineer, walked through the distinct versioning methods for these resources in this talk. He showed how to make non-breaking changes and handle breaking changes as your platform evolves.

What’s new with Upbound

David covered an overview of the latest developments with Upbound and tips for getting started. Upbound’s platform is powered by Crossplane. He explained more about using Upbound and its latest features to take Crossplane to the next level for managing multiple control planes at enterprise scale.

Q&A

Viktor Farcic, Developer Advocate at Upbound and host of DevOps Toolkit, facilitated the Q&A, covering a variety of topics around Crossplane.This included the effectiveness of end-to-end tests for different components, the integration of new pipeline steps in the latest release, and the use of MCP connectors. They also discussed practical implementations using AWS credentials, architectural decisions regarding resource scoping, and challenges in scaling functions. See all of the questions asked and associated answers in the recording.